The Happy Family eBook

“Mr. Green: I have just been
greatly entertained with the history of your very
peculiar deeds and adventures, and I wish to say that
I have discovered myself wholly lacking the sense
of humor which is necessary to appreciate you.

“As I am going home to-morrow, this
is my only opportunity of
letting you know how thoroughly I detest
falsehood in any form.
Yours truly,

“MARY EDITH JOHNSON.”

“Ain’t yuh proud?” Andy inquired
in a peculiar, tired voice. “Maybe I’m
a horrible liar, all right—­but I never done
anybody a dirty trick like that.”

Irish might have said it was Jack Bates who did the
mischief, but he did not. “We never knew
it was anything serious,” he explained contritely.
“On the dead, I’m sorry—­”

“Oh, she’s gone, all right. She went
to-day,” murmured Irish, and went out and shut
the door softly behind him.

* * * *
*

FOOL’S GOLD.

Andy Green, unshaven as to face and haggard as to
eyes, leaned upon his stout, willow stick and looked
gloomily away to the west. He was a good deal
given to looking to the west, these days when a leg
new-healed kept him at the ranch, though habit and
inclination would have sent him riding fast and far
over prairies untamed. Inaction comes hard when
a man has lived his life mostly in the open, doing
those things which keep brain and muscle keyed alike
to alertness and leave no time for brooding.

If Andy had not broken his leg but had gone with the
others on roundup, he would never have spent the days
glooming unavailingly because a girl with a blond
pompadour and teasing eyes had gone away and taken
with her a false impression of his morals, and left
behind her the sting of a harsh judgment against which
there seemed no appeal. As it was, he spent the
time going carefully over his past in self-justification,
and in remembering every moment that he had spent
with Mary Johnson in those four weeks when she stayed
with her father and petted the black lamb and the
white.

In his prejudiced view, he had never done anything
to make a girl hate him. He had not always told
the truth—­he would admit that with candid,
gray eyes looking straight into your own—­but
he had never lied to harm a man, which, it seemed
to him, makes all the difference in the world.

If he could once have told her how he felt about it,
and showed her how the wide West breeds wider morals—­he
did not quite know how you would put these things,
but he felt them very keenly. He wanted to make
her feel the difference; to see that little things
do not count in a man’s life, after all, except
when they affect him as a man when big things are
wanted of him. A little cowardice would count,
for instance, because it would show that the man would